Critical Mass

In the past, making an event was a lengthy process; even if you only intended to invite your close friends. It involved making numerous phone calls, or sending group emails, or even posting individual invitation cards. Our idea, is to try and solve that issue by creating a social space for managing events; whereby events from different social networking events can be linked, and anyone, irrespective of whether they belong to a social network (or not!) can be invited.

The main services our social networking application provide are:

• creating events
• organising and coordinating travel to provide an intelligent travel organiser.
• inviting friends to events (irrespective of whether they are on a social network or not

Below are some tools that provide similar services:

Event Websites

Facebook [1]
Facebook have made it very simple to create an event listing. You can create ‘Facebook Events’ and invite anyone on your friends list. However the downside to this is that you cannot invite people who aren’t on your Facebook friend list!
Our advantage: using our social networking application you can invite anyone irrespective of whether they are signed up to our network. 

Eventbrite [2]
Eventbrite is a site that is purely dedicated to organising events and even allows you to promote your event and organise tickets for it; and this don’t necessarily require you to have a social networking account to join these events.
Our advantage: our social networking application doesn’t just organise the event, it organises the travel too.

Travel Websites

TFL & National Rail & The Trainline [3,4,5]
These sites offer a ‘plan your journey’ service; whereby the user can input their start location, destination, and desired time of arrival/departure. They even offer a service where they will give you multiple options of transport (e.g tube/train/bus). It also allows you to purchase tickets on the site, in addition to giving you pricing information.
Our advantage: These services are for the individual, whereas our social space is for everyone; and only includes certain public transport options. Our users will input their start destination and preferred method of travel e.g Southampton, and Train. Our system will then suggest to all the ‘train-goers’ from Southampton that they get the same train together, and illustrate what group sharing options are available such as group train tickets. Similarly, for a local event several people who all opted to travel by taxi and live in the same postcode, would get the suggestion that they shared a taxi together.

Rome 2 Rio [6]
This sites enables you to plan a journey from anywhere in the world, and will provide you with the multiple coordinated travel resources that you need.
Our advantage: whilst this site seems similar to our social networking application by way of it’s travel organisation, it is missing the social networking element of our application. Our application provides a travel organisation service for groups of people all wanting to attend the same event even if they don’t necessarily know each other. 

Conclusion
There is a huge market for event based websites (based on the amount that already exist, and the popularity of Facebook events) and our idea will allow everyone to get involved; as well as providing them with easy cost effective travel solutions. Our idea clearly has a unique perspective as whilst there are websites and applications that are similar to certain parts of our social networking application, none of them combine social networking, with travel organisation.

References
[1] https://www.facebook.com/events/list
[2] https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/
[3] http://www.tfl.gov.uk/
[4] http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/
[5] http://www.thetrainline.com/
[6] http://www.rome2rio.com/